October 31, 2010

Some Notes On Today's Tribune-Review

It's fun, sometimes, to notice how skewed the reporting (or at least the choice of what to report - which is different and puts the bias-onus on the editors and not the reporters) can be over at Richard Mellon Scaife's Tribune-Review.

Most of the time it's subtle and within bounds.

Today, however, it is not.

An estimated 200,000 people showed up for Jon Stewart's "Restore Sanity and/or Fear" rally at the National Mall yesterday. The estimate comes from the same firm that estimated 87,000 attended Glenn Beck rally in late August. Whether the Beck numbers are too low is beside the point here. The point being that with the same company using the same methodology for the two different events, the Stewart rally racked up more than twice the people attending.

Having written that, I gotta ask what did the Trib go with this morning as the most prominent cover story online?

Notes a New York Times headline: "Fraudulent voting re-emerges as a partisan issue." Since when is voter fraud a "partisan" issue? Since it's Republicans complaining about Democrat-orchestrated fraud, you can bet.

But if you were to actually readthe Times piece, you'd see what the story is really about:

In 2006, conservative activists repeatedly claimed that the problem of people casting fraudulent votes was so widespread that it was corrupting the political process and possibly costing their candidates victories.

The accusations turned out to be largely false, but they led to a heated debate, with voting rights groups claiming that the accusations were crippling voter registration drives and reducing turnout.

That debate is flaring anew.

Tea Party members have started challenging voter registration applications and have announced plans to question individual voters at the polls whom they suspect of being ineligible.

In response, liberal groups and voting rights advocates are sounding an alarm, claiming that such strategies are scare tactics intended to suppress minority and poor voters. [emphasis added.]

"Democrat-orchestrated fraud"?

While many states have voter registration records riddled with names of dead people, out-of-date addresses and other erroneous information, there is little evidence that such errors lead to fraudulent votes, many experts note.

A report by the public-integrity section of the Justice Department found that from October 2002 to September 2005, the department charged 95 people with “election fraud”; 55 were convicted.

Among those, fewer than 20 people were convicted of casting fraudulent ballots, and only 5 were convicted of registration fraud. Most of the rest were charged with other voting violations, including a scheme meant to help Republicans by blocking the phone lines used by two voting groups that were arranging rides to get voters to the polls.

It's a "partisan issue" when the Republicans are using trumped up charges (myths, really) of "Democrat-orchestrated voter fraud" to suppress the voter registration of members of demographic groups they think will vote against them.

If they truly believed in democracy, they'd be bending over backwards to make sure everyone voted.

Which leads me to one shining moment at the Trib. Joe Mistik's column - stunning defense of the Separation of Church and State:

In truth, God is not mentioned even once in the Constitution. While the Founders all adhered to some form of Christianity or deism, their diverse religious beliefs instilled in them a fear that a theocracy could be established here. And contrary to the religious tests that some political movements impose on candidates, the Constitution says, "No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

Some extreme candidates even wrap themselves in the flag and argue that the principle requiring the separation of church and state does not appear in the Constitution. But James Madison, "The Father of the Constitution," said, "The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries."

Striking the proper balance, the Constitution does say, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."